Frank Ankersmit, Truth in History and Literature

Frank Ankersmit is professor for intellectual history and philosophy of history at Groningen Univer-sity. He has written many books on philosophy of history, political philosophy and aesthetics. Forthcom-ing is his two volume The Aesthetics of History and Politics.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 18, No. 1 (January 2010)Copyright 2010 by The Ohio State University

Truth in History and Literature

INTRODUCTION

This essay will deal with the role of narrative in both fiction and historicalwriting. I shall be the first to admit that the topic is anything but original. SinceRoland Barthes’s book on Michelet of more than half a century ago, since LionelGossman’s studies on La Curne de Ste. Palaye, on Thierry and (also) on Michelet,since Peter Gay’s Style in History, the topic has been addressed by numberlessphilosophers of history and literary theorists. And, self-evidently, everyone willprimarily think here of Hayden White, who determined more than any other thecourse of contemporary philosophy of history. As White put it in 1974: “how a givenhistorical situation is to be configured depends on the historian’s subtlety inmatching a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes toendow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say,a fiction-making operation” (85). As will be clear from this quote, when comparinghistory and the novel White was primarily interested in the literary dimension ofhistorical writing. The proposal revolutionalized philosophy of history—and evennow a lot still has to be done in order to cash in on all the promises of White’sproposal.

But exactly this might make us forget that the opposite route can be followed aswell. That is to say, we may, and should, also ask ourselves whether historicalwriting can contribute to a better understanding of the novel, or at least of somevariants of it. And if so, how. This, then, is the topic to be addressed in this essay.

Frank Ankersmit

And since we expect historical writing to provide us with knowledge of the past, Iwill primarily address the question of whether an analysis of historical writing willpermit us to discern a cognitive dimension in the novel. In sum, instead of arguingfrom the novel to history, I shall opt for the opposite route, and move from history tothe novel and in order to find out about what can or should count as the novel’s truth.

This problem of the novel’s truth can be dealt with in at least two differentways. In the first place one may be content with how the term truth in used in lesscontroversial contexts, such as that of the true statement or that of the “true” or validscientific theory, and then ask oneself whether this notion of truth also applies to thenovel. Hence, does the novel give us access—albeit in its own peculiar way—to thesame kind of truth that we express in singular true statements and in our assertionsabout states of affairs in the world? For an example of this approach,1 one may thinkof T. M. Greene’s claim that artistic truth is propositional truth (453–54). A variantof this position is the one defended by Hospers.2 Admittedly, he rejects the view thatthe arts can give us propositional truth and concludes that conventional theories oftruth will have to be adapted in order to be applicable to the novel—without,however, abandoning the heart of these theories of truth altogether. Mooijsummarizes Hospers’s argument thusly: “[a]ccording to [Hospers] artistic truth isnot, however, propostional truth or ‘truth about’, but ’truth to’; it is a form ofsimilarity” (“Objective Verification” 307). Mooij then comments: “there is perhapsno reason why a statement of the type ‘A is true to S’ could not be promoted to therank of a scientific hypothesis, so long as the similarity underlying the concept ‘truthto’ is sufficiently specified” (ibid.). The result is that Hospers’s position does notseem to differ essentially from the one taken by Greene, after all.

Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode gives us a second approach to the novel’struth. I have in mind here Gadamer’s notion of the “ästhetisches Bewusstein” andthat is proposed by him to define the rearrangement of philosophy effected by Kantand, even more so, by Schiller (38). Before Kant and Schiller there was no cleardemarcation-line between the domain of knowledge and that of aesthetics—withthe result that there was nothing specifically odd or oxymoronic about the notion of“aesthetic truth.” But Schiller radically pulled them apart. On the one hand, thiselevated the arts and aesthetics to a status they had never possessed before; but, onthe other, art had to pay for its newly acquired dignity the price of being expelledfrom the domain of Truth. Truth and beauty were from now on wholly differentspheres and no bridge could be constructed between the two of them. Gadamer’sästhetisches Bewusstein arguably reached its supreme climax with Derrida’sdeconstructivism scathingly condemning the search for truth as “the metaphysics ofpresence”; truth now disappeared behind the endless prolification of the signifierand language was no longer believed to be capable of meeting anything outsideitself.

Gadamer profoundly regrets this separation of aesthetics and cognitive truth; hewishes to rehabilitate the notion of aesthetic truth. This raises the question ofwhether and in what way the novel may help undoing the damage wrought by Kantand Schiller. We will then be in need of a conception of aesthetic truth that does notpermit of reduction to the propositional truth that Greene and Hospers had in mind.

30 Frank Ankersmit

For, obviously, such a reduction would immediately reaffirm the post-Schillerianregime in the relationship between aesthetics and science/knowledge. Historicaltruth will be my candidate.

To be sure, there is something curiously paradoxical about Gadamer’s strategy.For it can only be successful if part of the domain of truth can be reclaimed foraesthetics. But exactly doing this presupposes, again, a demarcation-line betweenaesthetics and science/knowledge. Of course, this will be a new demarcation-lineand one that assigns to aesthetics a larger part of philosophy’s territory than was thecase under the post-Schillerian regime. But a demarcation-line is a demarcation-line—and in this way the workings of the ästhetisches Bewusstein seem to havebecome a fait accompli with Kant and Schiller, and that can never be undone again.We cannot return to a pre-Schillerian naivety with regard to the relationship betweenaesthetics and science/knowledge; with Schiller we have lost our aesthetic innocenceforever, so to say. But we can redraw the map of the territories of, respectively,aesthetics and science/knowledge. And exactly this is what I hope to do in this essay.

In this essay I shall adopt Gadamer’s strategy for dealing with the issue of thenovel’s truth since the former presupposes (the possibility of ) a return to ouraesthetic innocence denying to aesthetics a cognitive domain of its own. This alsomakes the case of historical writing of so much interest: few people will deny thatthere exists such a thing as historical truth or historical knowledge. At the same time,however, we will see below that historical truth is not reducible to propositionaltruth. So if there is one domain where we can study the secrets of aesthetic truth, it’shistory that we shall have to turn to. And then we can ask ourselves, next, whetherwe might justifiably speak of the aesthetic truth of the novel or of the work of art ingeneral. Historical writing is, so to say, an advanced base enabling us to reclaim foraesthetics some of the territory that was lost to science/knowledge with the victoryof Schiller’s ästhetisches Bewusstsein.

THE LINGUISTIC TURN

In 1967 Richard Rorty published his by now so very famous anthology TheLinguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. In his introduction Rorty definedthe linguistic turn as “the view that philosophical problems are problems which canbe solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding moreabout the language we presently use” (3). In fact, there is an ambiguity here. For onthe one hand almost all of analytical philosophy of language since the days of Fregecould be described in this way—and then the linguistic turn would be identical withall of philosophy of language. But on the other Rorty had also in mind a specificdevelopment within philosophy of language itself, namely its farewell to empiricistaccounts of language assuming that language, truth, meaning and reference shouldall have their ultimate basis in empirical data about what the world is like. Thisrevolution in philosophy of language had been effected by Quine and can besummarized in three theses: 1) the indeterminacy of theory, 2) the inscrutabilty ofreference, and 3) the indeterminacy of translation. The main idea in all three cases

Truth and History in Literature 31

being that “language hangs loosely on the world,” to use Quine’s own apt metaphor,suggesting that language and truth have a certain inertia and autonomy with regard tothe data of experience.

This was bad news for the sciences insofar as these had always pridedthemselves on their exclusive reliance on objective empirical data in the acquisitionof knowledge and without any contribution by the scientist himself other than justlogic and mathematics. The (logical–positivist) ideal of the relationship betweenempirical evidence and scientific knowledge had to be abandoned as an unattainableutopia after Quine.

But it was very good news for the humanities where the constitutive role oflanguage in the acquisition and expession of knowledge had never been doubted. Infact, language was traditonally the main object of investigation in the humanities,often institutionalized academically in the Faculty of Arts and Letters. So in thehumanities one could hardly afford to doubt that language matters. We need not besurprised, therefore, that the linguistic turn was most warmly welcomed in thehumanities and that it seemed to rescue them from the neglect and contempt whichso much had been their sad fate under the previous, logical-positivist paradigm.

However, when thus capitalizing on the linguistic turn, theorists of thehumanities forgot that Quine had the sciences in mind and that it had certainly notbeen his intention to rehabilitate the humanities, for which he only felt distaste andcontempt. This may help to explain part of the shortcomings of the linguistic turn inthe humanities. Quine’s attack on empiricism was essentially a claim about therelationship between empirical fact and scientific theory, hence about therelationship between knowledge of the world what it is knowledge of. It was a newdeparture in the research of our cognitivist claims to knowledge of the world. But theadvocates of the linguistic turn in the humanities never really cared about truth andcognitivist claims. They only saw in the linguistic turn a welcome celebration oflanguage.

Though I do not have the pretension to be able to say the last word about this,my hunch is that this misunderstanding resulted from a pulling together of two levelson which the issue of truth may arise. Firstly, there is the (object-)level of (the)truth(s) about the world that are expressed in a text. Next, there is the (meta-)level ofestablishing either truthfully (or not, of course) which truth(s) the text actuallyexpresses about the world and whether those truths are legitimate. This second levelcan be said to shift the focus from first-order truth to the meaning of such truth. Inscience the first level will be the one that really counts. But in complex literary textsquestions of meaning and interpretation may drive questions of truth into thebackground; then it will be the second level that really matters.

Two things should be observed here. In the first place, the latter level was notprominently present in Quine’s own argument, as we would have expected becauseof his scientism.3 Put differently, the issue of meaning never had great importance forhim. It is illustrative, in this context, that Donald Davidson—Quine’s best knownand most influential disciple—even openly and deliberately reduced issues ofmeaning to issues about truth. In the second place, in the humanities pulling theobject- and metalevel together is more or less the natural thing to do. For here the

32 Frank Ankersmit

situation typically is much the opposite of that of Quine and Davidson: in thehumanities issues of truth are closely intertwined with issues of meaning, not merelybecause of the trivial fact that a statement’s or a text’s truth(s) can only beascertained after we are sure about its meaning. This observation presupposes theassumption that the fixation of meaning and that of truth are wholly independentprocedures. To put it metaphorically, it requires that you should have, on the onehand, the “horizontal axis” of language, meaning and interpretation and, on theother, wholly distinct from it, the “vertical axis” of truth and the relationshipbetween language and the world. In the humanities, however, language is “a way ofworldmaking,” to use Nelson Goodman’s happy phrase; interpretation involves notonly the fixation of meaning but also of a world. Then meaning will determine truth,in the sense of entailing its own truth-conditions; it will then be well-nigh impossibleto disentangle the vertical and the horizontal axis from each other. In this senseDerrida’s notorious “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is less outrageous than it may at firstsight seem, for he was right when suggesting that textual meaning defines a world ina way this could never be said about the prototypical singular true statement.

But it does not follow from the foregoing that there should be no real world thatis (onto-)logically apart from the text and that may occasion problems concerningthe relationship between the text and what it is about. Nevertheless, most advocatesof the linguistic turn tended to take Derrida’s statement quite literally and to“textualize” the world in the sense of seeing the world itself as if it were a textawaiting interpretation. Moreover, this habit of seeing everything as a text spreadwide beyond literary theory itself was also adopted in anthropology, cultural studies,law, sociology and reached even the departments of business and accounting.4 Theformal properties of the text were projected on all domains of social and culturalreality itself—with the result that objectively existing problems now took on theform of semantic and linguistic problems as occasioned by the texts used foraddressing them.

This “idealist” interpretation of Derrida’s dictum—and the consequent refusalto investigate the issue of the text’s cognitive claims—probably originated from thesimple fact that the linguistic turn made its entry into the humanities via literarytheory. Hence the discipline addressing the problem of the interpretation of novelsand poetry. Since novels are fictional and customarily do not have the pretension todescribe a course of events that really took place, it makes little sense to ask for thenovel’s referent. The result is that the vertical axis dropped out of sight, leavingtheorists with the horizontal axis of meaning and interpretation only. As will becomeclear in the course of my argument, this is only part of the truth about the novel,since the vertical axis linking the text to the world is present in fiction and the novelas well. But it is far from easy to say how and to what extent the novel may be saidto represent actual reality—and in literary theory the problem was rarely addressed,especially after the near to universal triumph of deconstructivism.

At any rate, the horizontal axis of meaning and interpretation attracted all theinterest at the expense of the vertical axis of truth and of cognitive claims, with theresult that we now have an impressive array of often very complicated theories aboutthe interpretation of the literary text—think of phenomenology, structuralism, post-


structuralism, new criticism, hermeneutics in many variants, new historicism,deconstructivism, semiotics, etc.—whereas the field of literary and textual truth wasallowed to remain barren and uncultivated.5

Had the linguistic turn made its entry into the humanities via historical writing,things might have gone quite differently. For historians write texts, as do novelists.However, the historical text is expected to tell us the truth about part of the past. Andno sensible person will deny that historians often succeed in doing so. The historianfailing here will be dourly criticized for this by his colleagues. A historicaldiscussion will then ensue, and we have no reason to doubt that such discussions canin principle be settled on the basis of both solid argument and documentaryevidence. This invites the question of in what way historical truth may contribute toan understanding of the truth of the literary text.

When addressing this question we must observe that the comparison of thenovel and of the historical text will require us to focus on one quite specific variantof the text, namely narrative. There exists an immense variety of texts—poetry,court-reports, articles of the law, peace treaties, instructions for the use of householdgadgets, love letters, emails, etc.—but none of these provide us with a commonground between the novel and the historical text. Only narrative fits the bill here, andeven only partially, as I shall be the first to admit. With regard to historical writing,think of books like Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance or of Huizinga’sWaning of the Middle Ages. Such so-called cross-sectional studies characterize acertain historical period instead of accounting for some development through time aswe expect from narrative.6 Next, whereas the nineteenth-century realist or naturalistnovel still preserved its essentially narrative form, the novel was no longernecessarily narrativist in the twentieth-century—so that other textual forms had nowbecome possible as well. Self-evidently, I could not possibly claim to pronounceabout all of these forms. So when speaking of the novel, I shall have in mind its morepedestrian nineteenth century variants and leave undecided to what extent myargument applies to others as well. One has to start somewhere, after all.

NARRATIVE

The problem of narrative’s truth claims—whether we have to do with historicalwriting or the novel—will self-evidently arouse our interest for what philosophershave to say on this. Luckily most of twentieth century philosophy is philosophy oflanguage—so we will expect there to be a wealth of philosophical studies of theproblem of textual and narrativist truth. But, much to our amazement, we shall findthat philosophers of language never ever addressed the problem. And we may cometo feel that philosophy of language has remained strangely incomplete down to thepresent day, because of its total disregard of text and narrative and of thephilosophical problems occasioned by them.

There is one exception, though. In a recent essay Galen Strawson dealt withmany of the claims currently being made for narrative’s explanatory power, coming

34 Frank Ankersmit

to the conclusion that these claims are seriously overblown and even ethicallydangerous. This is disappointing, of course. Nevertheless, his argument is of interestand discussing it will get us closer to the truth about narrative truth.

Strawson’s point of departure is how we experience ourselves. When discussingthis, he makes two distinctions. The first is the distinction between experiencingoneself as “an undifferentiated whole”—as a disorderly chaos—and the experienceof oneself as “an inner mental entity”—hence, as if order was created in this chaosfrom the perspective of some subsisting mental entity. The second distinction is thatbetween between “diachronic self-experience” and “episodic self-experience.”Strawson does not explain how these two distinctions are related; even more so, afterhaving mentioned the first distinction, he never returns to it in his essay. So let’sbegin with the second distinction. “Diachronic self-experience” is narrativist sincewe here experience ourselves as an ongoing narrative connecting past, present andthe future. Strawson notes that many champions of narrative say such experience isessential to our sense of ourselves and he calls this position the “narrative identitythesis.” He contrasts “diachronic self-experience” with “episodic self-experience”which involves no necessary connection between the our experiences at differentpoints in time. Citing himself as an example, he maintains that some people are“episodics” rather than “diachronics” and, thus, that the narrative identity thesis iswrong. That is, our identities are not dependent on our developing coherentnarratives out of the rich diversity of our experiences.7 More generally, Strawsonargues “that the past can be present or alive in the present without being present oralive as past” (192). Put differently, the fact that we may experience part of our lifeas past does not mean that we are having an experience of the past, because allexperience necessarily takes place in the present.

I agree with all of Strawson’s argument, but without accepting his conclusion.To begin with, Strawson discusses self-experience, but nowhere addresses thequestion of how self-experience is related to knowledge of the self. In fact, it maywell be that he would consider the distinction to be irrelevant. For example, one ofthe philosophers whose narrativism is criticized by Strawson is Charles Taylor, whois quoted by Strawson as follows: “a basic condition of making sense of ourselves isthat we grasp our lives as a narrative” (qtd. in Strawson 195 my emphasis). Clearly,Taylor talks here about self-knowledge rather than Strawson’s self-experience—butStrawson passes over this in silence. However, this makes a big difference. For wemay agree with Strawson that all experience takes place here and now and that it is amatter of simple logic that we cannot experience a previous self. But having here andnow knowledge of a previous self is wholly unproblematic, even though thatprevious self cannot itself be an object of experience in the present. Strawson’sepisodic self-experience and a diachronic or narrativist cognitive grasp of oneselfcan therefore happily go together.

As it happens, this insight may help us dissolve an old dispute in narrativistphilosophy of history concerning the autonomy of narrative with regard to what it isa narrative of. Louis O. Mink had advocated this autonomy with the argument thatnarrative is essentially post facto and, hence, radically distinct from what is narrated.


As he famously put it, “stories are not lived, but told” (60). First, there is life itself,and only afterwards life’s narrative can be told, if we wish to do so. Life, as it isactually lived by us, is a basically non-narrative category and we must, at all times,avoid the temptation of projecting narrative on life itself. And this is where narrativehas a certain autonomy with regard to life, or the actual recounted by narrative. Thesame is true if we move from our own individual lives to history in general. Hence,we must abandon “the idea that there is a determinate historical actuality, thecomplex referent for all our narratives of ‘what actually happened’, the untold storyto which narrative histories approximate” (202). The same view is defended byArthur Danto and Hayden White (as well as myself, for that matter). Mink’s positionwas critized from a phenomenological perspective by Paul Ricoeur and, even morecogently, by David Carr. According to both of them, we experience and organize ourlives narratively. So narrative truly goes all the way down, and we shall never get toa level where narrative is not yet present already. As Carr summarized his ownposition: “Louis Mink was thus operating with a totally false distinction when hesaid that stories are not lived but told. They are told in being lived and lived in beingtold” (125–26).

However, with Strawson we can establish who is right and wrong in this debate.Mink is right when holding that we experience life non-narratively; the self of self-experience is necessarily an “episodic” self, to use Strawson’s terminology. But Carris right, in his turn, when arguing that this episodic self always takes together adiachronic, and hence essentially narrativist, continuity. But this narrativistcontinuity is given to us not as self-experience, but as self-knowledge—however,embryonic, fragmentary and unsatisfactory this self-knowledge may be.

Putting it this way invites a transcendentalist view of narrative: narrative is thetranscendentalist condition of the possibility of all self-knowledge. Think of theKantian Anschauungsformen of space and time that are, according to Kant, notproperties of the world itself, but the transcendental condition for the possibility ofknowledge of things we may discern in the world, thanks to our projecting on it theseAnschauungsformen. So it is with narrative. Narrative is not just one more way oflooking at oneself and that could be exchanged without any real loss by non-narrativist—for example, scientific—ways of conceiving of the self. It’s the only andexclusive way for achieving self-knowledge. Science may give us “knowledge of theself,” but no “self-knowledge.” In order to clarify this distinction between knowledgeof the self and self-knowledge, I return to the first distinction made by Strawson inhis essay. As you may recall, this was the distinction between experiencing oneselfas “an undifferentiated whole” and experiencing oneself as what he describes as “aninner mental entity.” Though Strawson never took up this distinction again in hisessay, it seems fairly natural to graft it on his distinction between the episodic andthe diachronic or narrativist self. An undifferentiated whole, where the whole isnever more than the sum of its parts, surely is what would result from our takingtogether all our episodic self-experiences. Whereas the self as “an inner mentalentity,” no less self-evidently, will be what is given to us in diachronic, narrativistself-experience and that is suggestive of some “entity” persisting in a diachronicnarrative of the self. The main difference between the two being, needless to say, that

36 Frank Ankersmit

in the latter case there is some enduring “entity,” whether mental or not, which istypically absent in the former. These diachronic, narrativist entities are thus thetranscendental condition of moving from self-experience to (the possibility of) self-knowledge (and as different from knowledge of the self).

When reading Strawson this way, we may infer that just as Kantiantranscendentalism explains how we come to conceive of the world as being built upof individual objects existing in time and space, narrative transcendentalism gives usthese “inner mental entities,” in terms of which we constitute ourselves as diachronicindividual objects. And that we should never think of as if they somehow precededtheir narrative transcendentalist constitution: they only come into being thanks tonarrative.

HISTORICAL WRITING

Having arrived at this stage, it is now time to move on to the writing of narrativehistory. As we shall see in a moment, much of what was said above on the self can betransposed without change to historical writing. And I would not recoil from theclaim that all historical writing has its origin and paradigm in how we conceive ofthe self: self-knowledge is the model for all historical knowledge, though itobviously does not follow from this that all actual historical writing should be inagreement with this model. Similarly, scientific problems were often addressed withan epistemological model not permitting reliable answers to them.

Strawson’s distinction of the episodic and the narrative self has its analogue inDanto’s distinction between singular true statements, such as “Newton was born inWoolethorpe on Christmas Day 1642” and so-called “narrative sentences,” such as“the author of the Principia Mathematica was born in Woolethorpe on Christmasday 1642.” Unlike the former, the narrative sentence takes together two distincthistorical events—Newton’s birth and the publication of his Principia Mathematica(in 1687)—into one whole. The narrative sentence thus does what narrativestypically do, i.e., taking together within one whole what is separate in time. So wemight describe the former statement as “episodic,” to use Strawson’s terminology,whereas we have good reason to agree with Danto’s own characteristic of the latteras a “narrative sentence.” Furthermore, Danto emphasizes that the narrative sentencein question could not be uttered in 1642, but only after 1687, the date of publicationof the Principia Mathematica. Only after 1687 could it be known that the baby bornin 1642 would write that book later in his life. This is, according to Danto, whatmakes the narrative sentence into a typically historical statement. For historicalknowledge and insight should primarily be related to knowledge ex post facto. Andagain, everyone will agree here with Danto. Thus, historical awareness came intobeing with the awareness of the unintended consequences of intentional humanaction and with the corresponding ability to recognize (and express) the asymmetriesbetween past and present. In the West this historical awareness has included oursense of the symmetry between our often excellent intentions and their often no lessdisastrous unforeseen consequences.8


The German philosopher Hans Michael Baumgartner transcendentalizedDanto’s argument, just as I did exactly the same with that of Strawson a moment ago.He fully agrees with Danto’s account of the narrative sentences and with Danto’sthesis that the narrative sentence may give us access to how we relate to the past(Kontinuität 281). But he then goes on to say that Danto fails to adequately take intoaccount that narratives—even if consisting of narrative sentences—do typically addup to a narrative, diachronic whole. Indeed, nowhere in his book (nor anywhere else)does Danto discuss narrative as such; he nowhere suggests a historical or narrativistcounterpart to Strawson’s notion of an “inner mental entity” and that might provideus with a transcendentalist explanation of the possibility of historical knowledge.

Baumgartner also offers an explanation of this disturbing lacuna in Danto’sargument. The main idea being here that Danto, in spite of his penetrating analysis ofthe narrative sentences, remained blind to the fact that (historical) narrative producessuch “mental entities,” a kind of “narrativist thing,” so to say, and whose coming intobeing can only be explained when taking narrative more seriously than Danto did.

As examples of these mental entities in the field of historical writingBaumgartner invites us to consider notion such as “The Middle Ages,” “the FrenchRevolution,” or ”the Renaissance.” He then criticizes Danto for dealing with thesenotions as if they referred to things with the same ontological status as is possessedby what proper names like “Caesar” or “Napoleon” refer to.9 For example, Dantowrites “for it to be true that Petrarch opened the Renaissance, it is logically requiredthat the Renaissance take place, though in point of fact the Renaissance might havetaken place whether Petrarch opened it or not” (157). Clearly, Danto’s phrasing heresuggests that the Renaissance is just one more item on the past’s inventory, alongwith Petrarch himself, his beloved Laura, kings, statesmen, scholars and ordinarymen and their thoughts and actions. But as the very oddity of Danto’s phrase alreadysuggests this is not how we should conceive of “things” like the Renaissance. Rather,unlike historical personalities such as Petrarch, Louis XIV or Napoleon, theRenaissance belongs to the category of “things” (I’m deliberately phrasing this in avague and non-committal way) that only emerge, and that can only meaningfully bediscussed in narratives about the past. They are exclusively narrativist things, so tosay. As Baumgartner puts it: “in the light of these considerations the preoccupationwith the theoretical paradigm of the biography is misleading” (Kontinuität 299 mytranslation).10

The explanation is that the unity or continuity of persons or individuals such asCaesar or Napoleon are warranted by means of these notions (or sortal concepts, asthe philosopher might say) of “person” or “individual,” insofar as these notionsdenote a category of objects always possessing unity and continuity through time.This is essentially different with notions such as “the Middle Ages,” etc., for such(typically historical) notions do not presuppose unity and continuity (as is the casewith the notions of “person” or “individual”) but only create it.11 Whereas individualhuman beings, animals, tables and chairs are not in need of language in order topossess unity and continuity; they have these precious properties already before aword has or will ever be uttered. It would be preposterous to claim that they onlyacquire these properties thanks to how we define human beings, animals, etc.; we are

38 Frank Ankersmit

not the creators of the universe. So narrative historical language—into which Dantogave us so many profound insights—is the transcendental condition of thepossibility of having knowledge of typically historical “things” such as “the MiddleAges,” “the French Revolution,” or “the Renaissance.” Only thanks to narrative dothese “narrativist things” come into being.

Hence Baumgartner’s thesis that Danto’s argument in Analytical Philosophy ofHistory still awaited transcendentalization.12 Nevertheless, historians havemeaningful discussions about these peculiar narrativist “things,” and the fact that themodel of the biography does not apply here does not seem to stand in the way of theacquisition of knowledge of the past and the cognitivist claims supporting it. Andthen the question arises of how to account for the historian’s success in clarifying,understanding or even explaining the past with the help of this sort of notions thatBaumgartner had in mind. This question brings me to the heart of my argument.

TRUTH IN HISTORY

To begin with, narratives often offer us representations of things that havehappened, whether real or imaginary. This is where narratives may be similar to paintings, portraits, or landscapes which are said to be representations of theirsitters or of the hills and woods that had captured the painter’s attention.Nevertheless these two notions may not be confused; for example, you cannot“narrate” a person, a landscape, or a still-life, though these things can all berepresented unproblematically. Even more importantly, not all narratives dorepresent; think of a genealogical register, or of E. M. Forster’s well-known contrastbetween 1) “The king died and then the queen died” and 2) “The king died, and thenthe queen died of grief,” where 1) is merely narrative whereas 2) is a mini-storyrepresenting the queen’s despair about the death of her beloved husband (86). For anarrative to represent it must be organized around some central object or theme—whether in actual or an imagined reality, or whether leading its life exclusively on thelevel on narrative, as was the case with the kind of notions Baumgartner had in mind.So there is a certain asymmetry between the notions of narrative and representation.However, since historical narratives do always have one or more objects or themesaround which they are organized, we can safely attribute the function ofrepresentation to historical narrative.

So let’s now have a closer look at representation and focus on pictorialrepresentation since all the relevant properties of representation most clearly standout there. Take a portrait of Napoleon and that everyone will agree to see as arepresentation of Napoleon. So far no problem; problems arise only when we askourselves what to count as the representation’s represented—hence, what isrepresented by the portrait? The obvious answer is, of course, Napoleon. However,think of Napoleon as represented by David, Baron Gros, or Gillray. Surely, theserepresentations do all differ from each other—and we can say the same of all thehistorical representations of Napoleon written by countless historians over the lasttwo hundred years. So would it not follow that to each of these so different


representations must also correspond different representeds? But, again, will that notinvite the obvious objection that this must be wrong: surely, each of theserepresentations, pictorial or historical, do all have one and the same represented,namely the man whom we all know as Napoleon I, who lived from 1769 to 1821 andwho was Emperor of France?

But when saying this we are not as precise as we ought to be. For suppose thatone and the same person is depicted en face, en profil, from the backside, etc., wouldthat not oblige us to say that each time a different aspect of that person is therepresented? So, indeed, each representation has its own represented, as defined orsuggested by the representation. That is my main claim in this essay—hence thethesis that what a representation represents (e.g., Napoleon) must strictly bedistinguished from a representation’s represented (e.g., some aspect of Napoleon).13

It follows that representation is not, as we at first sight may be inclined to believe, atwo-place, but a three-place operator. We do have—firstly—(an) object(s) in reality(for example, Napoleon) and secondly representations of this (or these) object(s).But, thirdly, each representation drags along with itself its own represented, just aswe are all accompanied by our own shadow on a sunny day. And the line runningfrom objects in reality to a representation is far thinner and far more insecure thanthe one connecting a representation to its represented. Napoleon may occasion aninfinity of pictorial or historical representations of him, but to each of theserepresentations corresponds only one represented (though, admittedly, it will beimpossible to fix for once and ever what this represented is, because of itsdependence on what other representations of Napoleon there are).

So don’t model the former on reference as, admittedly, the case of portraitpainting so much seems to invite! We are tempted to see a picture of Napoleon as analbeit very complex statement on Napoleon in which reference is made to Napoleonin the way this happens in (descriptive) true statement. Pictures do not refer since wecannot pick out on them those and only components possessing the capacity torefer—which is the conditio sine qua non of successful reference. One may say of apainting of Napoleon that it is about Napoleon, but not that it refers to Napoleon inthe way that the statement “Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo in 1815” does referto Napoleon.14

In this way representation resembles how Frege, Peirce, Ogden, and Richardsconceive of signs: firstly, there is the sign itself, secondly, the sign has an extensionin the sense of denoting or referring to (a) certain object(s) in reality, and, thirdly, thesign has its meaning or connotation. But there is a difference: the sign’s meaning orconnotation is a conceptual entity and that we may find out about by consulting adictionary. But a representation’s represented is itself not conceptual (though it isdefined by what takes place on the conceptual level of the historical text); for, as wehave seen, it is an aspect of things (in the world). It is not conceptual, but part of theworld itself. In this way, the represented seems to hang somewhere in the middlebetween meaning and reference, or between connotation and denotation. Perhapsone might add that Saussure’s theory of the sign comes closest to all this, sinceSaussure takes no position in the issue of whether the signified is a conceptual thingor something in reality itself.

40 Frank Ankersmit

But there is one more property of the represented that is worth observing—andthat will help us clarify the relationship between historical writing and the novel. Ihave in mind here the fact the represented does not refer to or denote an individualthing: it is, as we saw, an aspect of a thing. And though the thing in question maywell be an identifiable individual object in the world—as is the case withNapoleon—the same does not hold for the represented. Even though we cansometimes (though not always) get access to these aspects via identifiable individualthings, aspects of things are not things themselves. A much similar situation obtainsif we think of notions such “the middle (or the point of gravity) of this plank.” Thephrase “this plank” certainly denotes or refers to an identifiable individual thing. Butthe same does not hold for notions as mentioned just now, even though the locationof the middle of this plank or of its point of gravity can be established with all theprecision we might desire, given sufficient relevant data about the plank’s physicalproperties. It may well be that certain identifiable individual things happen tocorrespond with the location of the plank’s middle or point of gravity, such as a knotin the plank’s wood or a mark that we may have placed on the plank in order toremind us of where this middle or point of gravity are on the plank. But that is merecoincidence; and these notions of “the middle of this plank” or of “the plank’s pointof gravity” do not denote such identifiable individual things. For they are merelyaspects of the plank, in the same way that a person’s back, left or right side are mereaspects of that person as the representeds of a certain representation of that person.Or think of “the average tax payer”: one can figure out down to the last cent howmuch taxes are paid by the average tax-payer, but it may well be that there is noactual individual tax-payer who pays exactly that amount of taxes.

This also raises the question of how to conceive of historical truth. Just like themore current definitions of truth—such as the correspondence or the coherencetheories of truth—representationalist historical truth does bridge the gap betweenlanguage and reality insofar as it links together the textual level of historicalrepresentation to its represented—and which is, as we have found, an aspect of pastreality itself. However, these aspects are not identifiable individual objects in thepast, with the result that correspondence and coherence theories do not apply here.Representation does not pick out some individual object having some properties thatare either correctly or incorrectly described by a descriptive statement about theobject in question. Yet this does not leave us helpless, for we may well have perfectlyreasonable and justifiable opinions about the cognitive merits of the aspect that issingled out by a representation. For example, in the case of portrait painting it willordinarily be considered little helpful to picture someone’s back or aspects of his orher appearance and that will tell us little about the depicted person. And so it is withhistory: large part of all historical debate concerns the question what aspects of thepast need to be taken into account above all all for achieving a proper grasp of it. Andsuch questions can be rationally discussed, as we know from the practice of history.

I hasten to add the following. Though representeds give us access to aspects andnot to identifiable individual things, these aspects may well (though not necessarilyalways) be aspects of identifiable individual things—just as the fact that noidentifiable individual things correspond to notions such as “the middle” or “the


point of gravity of this plank” still leaves us perfectly free to assert that the middle orthe point of gravity of this plank is the middle or the point of gravity of this plank.But, again, there are lots of aspects to this plank to which no identifiable individualobjects on or of this plank correspond.

So it is with historical writing. Historical representations focus our attention oncertain aspects of the past. This is where we should discern its truth claims—so notin the truth or falsity of a historical narrative’s assertions on identifiable individualobjects. All such assertions may be true, while, at the same time, the historicalrepresentation still lacks the stamp of “historical” truth since it fails to present uswith an aspect of the past. Again, historical truth should not be conceived of ascorrespondence or coherence—and it certainly is one of the fascinations of historicalwriting that it makes us realize ourselves that there is a notion of truth different fromhow that notion is traditionally defined and discussed. Though historical truth clearlyhas an affinity with Heidegger’s (and Husserl’s) notion of truth as “aletheia” or“Unverborgenheit” (disclosure). For in both cases, truth has the character of a self-revelation of reality; it should be situated in the world rather than be seen as aproperty of what is said about the world. Not language but reality itself lights herethe light of truth, though this self-revelation of reality can only be achieved thanks torepresentation. To continue my light-metaphor: truth in history typically is areflection of the light radiated on it by representations, and we constructrepresentations for no other reason than to achieve this effect of a reflection by (past)reality. Historical representation, or historical narrative reminds us here of Abrams’smetaphor of the Romantic poet as a lamp shedding light on things hidden in the dark,which he illustrates with a passage in which Coleridge comments on WordsworthPrelude:

of moments awful,Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,When power streamed from thee. And thy soul receivedThe light reflected, as a light bestowed. (qtd. in Abrams 60)15

These is one signal difference, though: in this conception of the Romantic poet lighthas its source in the pure given of the poet’s genius, whereas the light of historicalnarrative truth is produced by carefully constructed and intensively discussedhistorical representations of the past. The myth of Romantic genius is replaced hereby the rationality of historical debate. And though we may well be fascinated by howthe historian continues the tradition of poetic genius, we will be fascinated evenmore by these reflections cast back to us by the past—and quite rightly so, for hereone must discern the “empiricist” dimension of historical writing. Not identifiableindividual things in the past (as mentioned in singular true statements) are thehistorian’s object of empirical investigation, but the aspects thereof—and these arenot identifiable individual things, as we saw a moment ago.

But whereas Heidegger’s Unverborgenheit seems to move us beyond scientificand disciplinary rationality, historical truth is firmly attached to the practice and therationality of historical discussion. And as everyone acquainted with the practice of

42 Frank Ankersmit

history will know, there is nothing particularly mysterious or mystic about historicaldiscussion. It progresses satisfactorily and the triumphs of contemporary historicalwriting are no less impressive than those of the sciences. The philosopher (ofhistory) therefore has no reason to worry about how historians achieve historicaltruth. On the contrary, it presents him with a fascinating new conception of truth andof disciplinary rationality. And he should avoid projecting on historical writingconceptions of truth alien to it in order to explain whether and why truth is, or is not,attainable in the practice of historical writing. For who would doubt that it is? Butdisciplinary truth is not in need of philosophical explanation—unless thephilosopher has the pretension to be better informed about historical writing thanhistorians themselves are. As Quine and Rorty insisted, the philosopher should avoidsuch pretensions: a naturalized epistemology is all he can give and that one canreasonably expect from him.

HISTORY AND THE NOVEL

I shall now proceed to a comparison of historical writing and the novel from acognitivist perspective. To begin with, it will be clear that one traditional barrierbetween history and the novel has been taken away with the argument expoundedabove. I have in mind here the argument formulated already by Aristotle in hisPoetics and that certainly has a good deal of a priori plausibility: “The poet and thehistorian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. . . . The true difference is that onerelates what happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a morephilosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express theuniversal, history the particular” (35). Hence, the idea is that the historian’sstatements are always linked to particular facts, having taken place at particulartimes and places, whereas the novel is free from this restriction. The hierarchy thatAristotle’s claims between poetry and history loses much of its appeal if we realizeourselves that the novelist relates facts no less than does the historian—albeit itimaginary facts. But from a philosophical point of view the distinction between realand imaginary facts is immaterial here—and insofar as the philosopher, alwaysstriving for truth, would have to chose, he will undoubtedly prefer history to fiction.But, apart from that, we can agree with Aristotle, that the historical text is true to factwhile this will ordinarily not be the case with the novel and poetry. And, indeed, thisseems a very plausible way for distinguishing between history and the novel.

However, if we return to Aristotle’s argument while having in mind what wefound out about a historical narrative’s represented, there appears to be much morecommon ground between history and the novel than immediately meets the eye, andthan Aristotle believed. For this more “philosophical and higher” dimension thatAristotle attributed to the novel and withheld from historical writing is present in thelatter as well. Recall how a historical representation delineates certain aspects of partof the past and that it considers essential for achieving an adequate grasp of it. Now,aspects do have a certain generality since they can be aspects of an (in principle)endless variety of things—all material things have a front and backside, a left and


right side, and so on. Similarly, to return to the plank example, the plank’s middle orits point of gravity are also aspects of the plank permitting of generalization, sinceall material objects have middles and points of gravity.

It is also true, on the other hand, that in the context of historical representationan element of individuality or of particularity is involved as well—and that has itsorigin in the uniqueness of each historical representation proposing the delineationof a certain aspect of the past. Such proposals function as a kind of floodlight thatmay lighten, so to say, aspects of the past, while others, deemed to be less relevant,are left in the dark. And each proposal will do this in a different way. This also makesclear that in historical narrative individuality and generality always go together: theindividuality or particularity of the narrative’s representationalist proposal isresponsible for a generality always corresponding with it—and only it. This is whythe article in phrases like “the Middle Ages,” “the Renaissance,” or “the Interbellum”may be misleading: the uniqueness suggested by the article correctly indicates thateach individual representation of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or theInterbellum is, indeed, unique, but it may obscure, at the same time, 1) that there areas many Middle Ages, Renaissances and Interbellums, as we have representations ofthem, and 2) that to each of these these representations corresponds the “generality”of a certain aspect of the past, in the sense I’ve been using that word here. It followsthat the generality in question differs from the one we know from the sciences whereeach reminiscence of particularity is absent. Hence, though laws and scientificexplanation play an important and even indispensable role at the level of historicalresearch, they have no significance for that of historical narrative and representation.So when speaking of the truth of historical writing or of the novel, I am not thinkingof such trivial observations as that Dostoyevsky must have been a fine psychologist.

Continuing now this comparison of history and the novel, I begin by dealingwith the historical novel before turning to the novel in general. A very obvious thingto do, since the historical novel clearly is the trait d’union between the two of them.It’s a novel, but it can and will also be read for the information it gives about the past.So the historical novel is the place to look if you wish to find out about therelationship between the two. Now, to begin with, we must realize ourselves that thetruth or falsity of the statements contained by either a historical narrative or ahistorical novel is insufficient for distinguishing between the two. That brings usback to what one might call the “Aristotle-intuition,” as mentioned a moment ago,where factual truth was used for distinguishing between historical writing and thenovel.

However, one could imagine a historical novel on a part of the past that is sowell documented that evidence can be given for each of the novel’s statements. Next,there may be errors in a historical narrative and even if their number would beconsiderable, no one will even begin to think that this might be a historical novel. Itwill simply be condemned as bad history.

So the difference between historical narrative and the historical novel is formalrather than material and can be found in how historical truth is presented in each ofthem. In a historical narrative historical truth is discovered, presented, and defendedagainst potential criticism. Especially on the level of factual truth; here historians

44 Frank Ankersmit

may go at great length to explain their choice and interpretation of source materialand to justify the causal claims made by them in their narrative. Indeed, none of thishas its counterpart in the text of the historical novel—though it may well be that theauthor of a historical novel did a lot of historical research before writing it. Next,there is the level where the historian presents his readers with a representation of thepast inviting them to focus on certain aspects of the past rather than on others. And,obviously, this dimension is present in the historical novel as well: it functions atleast partly as a history book by intimating what the past in which it is located musthave been like and what aspects of the past we should focus on.

However, whereas a historical narrative aims at the construction of somerepresentation of part of the past, the historical novel applies the historicalknowledge conveyed by a representation of the past to the historical novel’s maincharacters.16 This is also why, as Lukács already insisted, a historical novel’s maincharacters typically are flat, uninteresting and of no historical significancethemselves.17 The past is shown there as it presents itself to the countless namelesspersons undergoing it and who never determine its course.18 Writing a historicalnovel around a well-known and important historical personality is asking for trouble.For then the application of a historical representation’s represented aspects of thepast to a person is likely to be complicated by facts about that person that thehistorical novelist will have to respect. It can be done, but it’s awkward, and onewould rather avoid these complications. It’s a bit like pasting wall-paper: the rougherand the more uneven the wall is, the more difficult the task and the worse the result islikely to be.

So the difference between the historical text and the novel will be much likethat between a textbook on mechanics and the civil engineer’s design for a bridgeand in which the textbook’s knowledge is applied to that specific bridge. Thehistorical novel gives us applied knowledge of the past.19

There is another asymmetry between historical writing and the historical novel,and that one could define as the difference between (the explicitness of) “saying”and (the deliberate multi-interpretability of ) “showing.” The historian will not“show” the past but just “say” what, in his view, it has been like20; he will be asexplicit as possible about all this and never leave his readers in doubt about hisauthorial intentions. The historical novelist—as a novelist—will know that this doesnot work in the novel, and that his (historical ) novel must be as open and multi-interpretable as reality itself is. For this is what we expect of novels: they give us anepiphany of reality itself. So he must “show” to his readers what the world is like—or the world of the past as the case may be—but he leaves it to his readers to find outabout that for themselves.

Though, as I should wish to emphasize, this has its analogue in historicalwriting on the level of historical representation as well. The nature of historicalrepresentation is basically intertextualist and requires its contextualization within anindefinite set of cognate representations. In sum, historical representations willtypically escape authorial intention and need interpretation no less than our socialand political world itself. This is where the historical discipline suddenly partakes inthe logic of the novel.


Nevertheless, this does not alter the cognitivism shared by historical writingand by the historical novel; though more openly and directly in historical writing andthough more covertly and implicitly in the historical novel, both claim to say or showwhat the past has been like, and both can be either criticized for their failure in doingso or be praised for their success of giving us access to a past world that has becomealien to us.21

Finally, I move from the historical novel to the realist novel and will be contentwith repeating what Louis Maigron had already said about this more than a centuryago. For Maigron the realist or naturalist novel was born with Honoré de Balzac’sComédie Humaine—a series of both written and projected novels with which Balzacaimed at giving a literary image of his own time. Maigron lengthily explainsBalzac’s admiration for Sir Walter Scott and then goes on to say:

The novel is for him [i.e. Balzac] in fact nothing but the novel of Walter Scott,but then emptied of its archaic substance and filled with modern material. The“Waverley Novels” evoked past societies, and we need not insist again on thefidelity and the power of these evocations. With even more truth and even moreconvincingly the Comédie Humaine makes us relive all of a modern epoch in allthe prodigious multiplicity of its details and in the endless variety of itscontrasts. And for the first time the novel will have completely achieved it goal,and have offered us the most exact and most perfect “image of society.” (429my translation)

[le roman n’est chez lui, en effet, que le roman de Walter Scott vidé de sasubstance archaïque et rempli de matière moderne. Les ‘Waverley Novels’évoquaient des sociétés disparues, et quelle était la fidélité de cette évocation etsa puissance, nous n’avons pas à le redire; avec plus de vérité et un relief plussaisissant, la Comédie Humaine fera revivre toute une époque moderne dans laprodigieuse multiplicité de ses détails et de l’innombrable variété des sescontrastes; et pour la première fois le roman aura complètement atteint sonobjet et sera la plus exacte et la plus parfaite des ‘images sociales’.]

Hence, what Balzac achieved and was further perfected in the naturalist and realistnovel from Balzac, via Flaubert to Maupassant, to the brothers Goncourt and Zola,was basically the application of the techniques of the historical novel to modern life.The parameters of the past in the historical novel were exchanged for those of thepresent—and that gave us the realist or naturalist novel.22 Hence the novel aboutwhich Zola wrote in the preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin: “whenwriting Thérèse Raquin, I forgot about the world, and I lost myself in an exact andscrupulously careful copy of human life; I completely gave myself to an analysis ofthe mechanisms of the human mind” [“tant que j’ai écrit Thérèse Raquin, j’ai oubliéle monde, je me suis perdu dans la copie exacte et minutieuse de la vie, me donnantentier à l’analyse du mécanisme humain”] (9 my emphasis and translation). And isthis not what every historian hopes to achieve as well?

46 Frank Ankersmit

CONCLUSION

I come to a conclusion. When discussing historical writing and the novel mostcontemporary theorists preferably focused on the poetic or novelist dimension ofhistorical narrative. Few people will doubt that this has been the most importantdevelopment in philosophy of history since World War II. It completelyrevolutionized philosophy of history—if only because now for the first time theproblem of the historical text as a whole was put on the agenda of philosophy ofhistory. The results of this new and revolutionary departure have been impressive—and much work still needs to be done here.

However, as so often in life, these important gains went together with somelosses elsewhere. For seeing historical narrative from a poetic perspective relegatedthe issue of its truth to the background. The emphasis has been throughout onnarrative form in historical writing rather than on what may make a historical text trueand on the problem of its cognitivist claims. The unfortunate consequence was thatthe analysis of the cognitive claims made in historical writing was now left totheorists rejecting the narrativist turn proposed by White and others. So by now thereare two groups of historical theorists—those who discuss the historical text and thosewho investigate the cognitivist claims of historical writing—and both groups by andlarge ignore each other. And much is to be said in favor of the diagnosis that this ishow Gadamer’s ästhetisches Bewusstein manifests itself in contemporary philosophyof history. One more victim of this sad state of affairs was the issue of the truth of thenovel. This issue now could no longer be addressed—for doing so only has a chanceof success after one has begun by accepting the truth of historical writing.

This is a regrettable state of affairs and in this essay I’ve made a modest effortto remedy it. I hoped to do so by insisting that the narrative form of the novel mayvery well go together with truth and with cognitive aspirations. The scope of myargument above was restricted to the realist novel, so I shall be the first to concedethat it has no bearing on all the variants of the novel that were developed in thetwentieth century. Even so, I’m convinced that there is a cognitivist bridge betweenthe novel and historical writing and that we should make use of more frequently inthe future when discussing historical writing and the novel.

ENDNOTES

1. Whose ancestry can be traced back to Aristotle’s conception of mimesis. For a brief survey of thistradition—with an emphasis on the eighteenth century—see Abrams 8–14 and 31–42.

2. Both this reference and the one in the preceding sentence I owe to Hans Mooij.

3. Though not wholly absent, if we think of his notion of “semantic ascent” (271–76).

4. See Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey.

5. A notable exception is Cebik, especially Chapter 6. But the book is disappointing since it proposes tosee the results of socio-scientific research as the model of “narrative truth” as found in the novel.


6. Though it was often pointed out that the specificity of such periods presuppose the recognition oftheir being different from what came before and after. In this way, even cross-sectional studies can besaid to presuppose narrative.

7. I should admit that there is a certain sloppiness in Strawson’s argument insofar as he presents the“diachronic” and the “episodic self-experience” as psychological categories rather than in logical orphilosophical terms. It may be that psychology makes us believe in the diachronic self for whichphilosophy leaves no room.

8. See Chapter 8 of my Sublime Historical Experience.

9. I also remind here of what I have said on Danto’s use of the term “Renaissance” at the end of thesecond section of my paper.

10. “Im Licht dieser Uberlegungen erweist sich die Präokkupation durch das geschichtstheoretischeParadigma der Biographie als irreführend.”

11. This is the thesis I defended in my Narrative Logic.

12. Baumgartner repeated the same argument a few years later: “we must recall, above all, that that notonof ‘narrative’, meant to characterize the text’s structure, does not have a literary but a logicalsignificance. . . . For if one analyses the basic narrative structure of the historical object, it willbecome clear that each historical construct, that is, each state of affairs, if understood as a historicalstate of affairs, has the following properties: it is 1) particularist, 2) retrospective, 3) constructivist,and 4) in agreement with the meaning of all history without closure, hence open to the future”[“festzuhalten ist zunächst, dass der als Strukturbegriff verwendete Ausdruck Erzählung nichtliterarische, sonder logische Bedeutung besitzt. . . . Analysiert man nämlich die Erzählstruktur deshistorischen Gegenstandes nach ihrem wesentlichen Grundzügen, so stellt sich heraus, dass jedeshistorische Gebilde, d.h. jeder Sachverhalt, der als geschichtlicher Sachverhalt augefasst wird, 1.partikular, 2. retrospektiv, 3. konstruktiv und 4. vom Bedeutungsgehalt der Geschichte herunabgeschlossen, d.h. offen auf Zukunft hin ist”] (“Die Erzählstruktur” 73–74 my translation).

13. What I call here “aspects” probably comes close to what Mooij understood by the “typical,” and thathe presents as a fusion of the general and the particular. A “universal meaning” is given here to the“particular.” Furthermore, Mooij relates the typical to the work of art’s symbolic power and “to whichcorresponds a general aspect of human life outside the work of art” (“Roman en Werkelijkheid” 84my translation).

14. For an elaboration of this, admittedly, somewhat amazing claim, see my Historical Representation39–49.

15. No less illustrative is the quote from Yeats that Abrams choose as epigraph for his book: “it must gofurther still: that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turnlamp.” It is to be regretted that Richard Rorty—the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—never commented on the Romanticists’ exchange of the metaphor of the mirror for that of the lamp.

16. In historical writing the past is shown from the perspective of the representation proposed by thehistorian; in the historical novel the past is shown from the perspective of the personalities presentedin the novel. As Käte Hamburger puts it: in the historical novel the “Ich-Origo” of the historical text’sauthor and reader is replaced by the “Ich-Origo” of the novel’s personalities. See for this Mooij’s“Roman en Werkelijkheid” 69.

17. “The hero of Scott’s novels always is a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman. Hegenerally has a certain, though never outstanding practical common sense, a certain moralsteadfastness and decency, which, however, never grows into some veritable passion or into theenthusiast and unconditional embrace of some big cause” [“Der Held der Schottschen Romane iststets ein mehr oder weiniger mittelmässiger, durchschnittlicher Englischer Gentleman. Dieser besitztin allgemeinen eine gewisse, nie überragende praktische Klugheit, eine gewisse moralische Festigkeit

48 Frank Ankersmit

und Anständigkeit, die aber niemals zu einer menschlich hinreissenden Leidenschaft erwächst,nie begeisterte Hingabe an eine grosse Sache ist”] (Lukács 39–40 my translation; see also 42–43).

18. Surely this has been one of the most revolutionary achievements of Scott’s historical novel. In the firstplace, it meant the entry of ordinary men in the representation of the past. And one might well discernhere an anticipation of what would become known in our own time as “Alltagsgeschichte,” the historyof everyday life. Next, Scott’s procedure unintentionally effected a mixture of two quite differentstory-lines: that of the course of history itself and that of the lives of his so very inconspicuous heroes.This is where Scott’s historical novel comes close to the mixture of the high and the low style thatAuerbach had argued to be the defining characteristic of Western literary realism in his Mimesis. Andit comes no less close to Roland Barthes’s “effet du réel,” the reality effect of the naturalist novel, thatconvinces us that things must have exactly been as the novelist presents them to us. This also is whatBalzac transposed from the historical to the realist novel: “it will be the eternal glory of Balzac tohave made us see that even the most humble, the most common and vulgar things, do have their owninterest, and that daily life with its jumble of small insignificant incidents and never outside thedomain of the ordinary, may nevertheless have its own poetry” [“Ce sera la gloire éternelle de Balzacd’avoir fait comprende que les choses les plus mesquines, les spectacles les plus communs et les plusvulgaires portent en eux leur intérêt, et que la vie familière avec le pèle-mèle des ses menus incidentsquotidiens et dans son cadre habituel, peut offrir encore de la poésie”] (Maigron 428 my translation).

19. See Chapter 1 of my Narrative Logic.

20. This is where one might disagree with Ranke’s famous dictum that is is the historian’s task “zu zeigen[= “show”] wie es eigentlich gewesen.”

21. When discussing the nineteenth century Italian historical novelist Manzoni (1785–1873), Lukácswrites: “he [Manzoni] believes that there is and should not necessarily be a contradiction betweenfidelity of historical fact and a poetically-individualing and dramatic enlivenment of historical facts.Historical documents inform us about historical facts and about the past’s evolution. The dramaticpoet does not have the right to change anything here. Nor is there any occasion to do so, for when hetruly wishes to present his readers with real human individuals, historical facts will prove to be hisbest guide and support: so the deeper he goes into history, the more successful he will be with this”[“er meint . . . dass es keinen prinzipiellen Widerspruch zwischen historischer Treue und dich-terisch-individualisierender dramatischer Verlebendigung gibt and geben kann. Die historischeÜberlieferung teile uns die Tatsachen, die allgemeinen Entwicklungsrichtungen mit. Daran etwas zuändern habe der dramatische Dichter kein Recht. Er habe aber auch keine Ursache, denn wenn erseine Gestalten wirklich individualisiert und gestalten wolle, so finde er dazu in den geschichtlichenTatsachen die wichtigsten Anhaltspunkte und Hilfsmittel:je tiefer er in die Geschichte eindringe,desto mehr”] (133 my translation).

22. Having expounded the “realism” of the historical novel, Maigron goes on to say: “but does one notrecognize the method ordinarily used by Balzac and Flaubert? Were they not compelled to get underthe skin of petty civil servants, of physicians and of apothecaries, in order to write certain volumesof the Comédie Humaine or Madame Bovary?” [“mais ne reconnaît-on pas là l’ordinaire méthode deBalzac et de Flaubert? N’ont–ils pas dû entrer ‘dans la peau’ des petits employés, des bourgeois, desmédecins, et des pharmaciens de campagne, pour écrire certains livres de la Comédie Humaine ouMadame Bovary?”] (420 my translation).

WORKS CITED

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1953.

Ankersmit, F. R. Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001.


———. Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff,1983.

———. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005.

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Translated by S. H. Butcher. New York: Dover, 1951.

Baumgartner, Hans Michael. “Die Erzählstruktur des historsichen Wissens und ihr Verhälrnis zu denFormen seiner Vermittling.” In Historisches Erzählen: Formen und Funktionen, edited by SiegfriedQuandt and Hans Süssmuth, 73–77. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1984.

———. Kontinuität and Geschichte: Zur Kritik und Metakritik der historischen Vernunft. Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, 1972.

Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986.

Cebik, L. B. Fictional Narrative and Truth: An Epistemic Analysis. New York: Univ. Press of America,1984.

Danto, A. C. Narration and Knowledge. With an introduction by Lydia Goehr and a conclusion by FrankAnkersmit. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. New York: Harcourt, 1985.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972.

Greene, T. M. The Arts and the Arts of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940.

Hospers, John. “Literature and Human Nature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17 (1958):45–57.

———. Meaning and Truth in the Arts. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1948.

Lukács, Georg L. Der Historische Roman. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1965.

Maigron, Louis. Le Roman Historique à L’époque Romantique: Essai sur L’influence de Walter Scott.Paris: Hachette, 1898.

Mink, Louis O. Historical Understanding. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987.

Mooij, J. J. A. “On the Objective Verification of Artistic Truth.” In Proceedings of the Fifth InternationalCongress of Aesthetics, 306–309. Amsterdam: Polak and van Gennep, 1964.

———. “Roman en Werkelijkheid.” In Tekst en Lezer, 64–91. Amsterdam: Polak and van Gennep, 1979.

Nelson, John S., Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences:Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison, WI: The Univ. of WisconsinPress, 1987.

Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. Cambridge: The M. I. T. Press, 1964.

Rorty, Richard. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1967.

Strawson, Galen. “Against Narrativity.” In Real Materialism and Other Essays, 180–227. Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.

White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in CulturalCriticism, 81–100. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978.

Zola, Émile. “Preface de la deuxième édition.” In Thérèse Raquin. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1968.

50 Frank Ankersmit

Copyright of Narrative is the property of Ohio State University Press and its content may not be copied or

emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.

However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Frank Ankersmit, Truth in History and Literature

Documents

Transcript of Frank Ankersmit, Truth in History and Literature